Culture Critique March 2011 v 2 No 1

The Cultural Politics of Israels Mizrahim: From Marginalization toward Dominance

By Benjamin Acosta

Abstract: This paper traces the cultural and political rise of Israels Mizrahi population. Denigrated by Israels founding Ashkenazi elite, the Mizrahim persevered through decades of cultural persecution, economic deprivation, and socio-political marginalization. Ultimately, through the presentation of an attractive set of cultural practices and a negotiated narrative of Israeliness and Jewishness, the Mizrahim redirected Israels cultural development and political trajectory. Moreover, with the aid of the latest generations of Ashkenazim, the Mizrahim have largely co-opted the common sense of the Israeli collective, as well as the Jewish states mainstream culture. Politically, the failure of the Oslo peace process legitimized Mizrahi concerns about negotiating with the Palestiniansthereby taking the Mizrahim from a crude electoral power within Israeli politics based on simple numbers to establishing the foundation for a genuinely organic political platform that now has the attention of Israeli society as a whole. Today, for their own ideological purposes the Mizrahim have largely politicized the mass base of Israeli society, shifting Israeli politics to the right, refocusing the economy away from a socialist approach to a capitalist prescription, and reestablishing a collective appreciation for traditional Jewish values.

Benjamin Acosta is currently working on an inter-field Ph.D. in political science and cultural studies at Claremont Graduate University.

culture critique, the online journal of the cultural studies program at CGU, situates culture as a terrain of political and economic struggle. The journal emphasizes the ideological dimension of cultural practices and politics, as well as their radical potential in subverting the mechanisms of power and money that colonize the life-world.
http://ccjournal.cgu.edu 2011

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Since the establishment of Israel in 1948, Ashkenazim (Jews of European descent) 1 have dominated the socio-cultural, economic and political development of the Jewish state. Israels Ashkenazi elite boast many achievements. They (re)constructed a nation from scores of diasporic communities, revived a lifeless language, and (re)established the Jewish state in the Middle East amid the heart of the Islamic world. Within a few decades, they groomed the Southern California-sized country into an economic and military regional power. But despite their many achievements, the Ashkenazi elite have had their day atop Israels ethno-cultural hierarchy. 2 Further, the dethroning of the Ashkenazim from their dominance has directly resulted in the gradual replacement of Israels original socialist-economic system and has initiated a transformation process of the tightly regulated political systemboth of which Israels Ashkenazi elite have guarded as the fruits of their utopian vision for the state. Oftentimes the establishment uses any means necessary to prevent institutional change. 3 So, how did Israels elite social group lose its grip on its cultural hegemony? Three interrelated and overlapping processes account for the socio-cultural change that has occurred in Israel over the last few decades. First, at the center of Israels cultural alteration stand the contagious cultural effects of Israels Mizrahim (Jews of African and Asian descent). 4 By maintaining their cultural traditions and remaining

In Hebrew, the word Ashkenazim literally stands for German Jews, though typically signifies all Jews of European descent. Ashkenazi marks the singular form of the word. 2 See Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005). 3 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 177. 4 In Hebrew, the word Mizrahim literally stands for Easterners, though typically signifies Jews of Middle Eastern, North African, Central and South Asian descent; and, the word has come to incorporate Sephardi Jews or Jews originating from the Iberian Peninsula. Mizrahi marks the singular form of the word.

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resolute through decades of economic poverty and socio-political marginalization, even in the face of constant incentives to assimilate into the hegemonic Ashkenazi pioneering culture, the Mizrahim gained the opportunity to de-naturalize and break down negative stereotypes attached to Mizrahi. Second, regarding treatment of the Mizrahim, the Ashkenazi masses within a few generations largely recognized the out-oftouch ideological stereotypes they held of the Mizrahim and shifted from practicing a denigrating Orientalism of the Conrad typology to a romanticizing Orientalism of the T.E. Lawrence brand. Eventually, the negotiated Israeli narrative of the Mizrahim found a society-spanning audience, resulting in the induction of numerous Mizrahi cultural practices and symbols further into mainstream Israeli society. Third, the Palestinian intensification of conflict with Israel after the failure of the Oslo peace process validated long-held right-wing 5 Mizrahi views on Jewish-Muslim relations 6 and consequently delegitimized the primary political party of the Ashkenazi elite. Each of these three interrelated factors contributed to the advent of a Mizrahi cultural politics that today promises to guide Israels cultural and political development for the foreseeable future. The Mizrahim: Israels Other Jews Since their mass immigration to Israel mostly from Islamic countries during the 1950s and 1960s, the Mizrahim or bnei edot haMizrah (sons of the Eastern communities),

In Israeli politics, each political issue oftentimes draws its own left-right spectrum in which one can place the major political parties. Rarely, do parties always line up on every issue in the exact place of such a continuum. Therefore, the term right-wing is used here with primary regard to security issues, and secondarily to the economy and traditional values. 6 Sammy Smooha, Ethnicity as a Factor in the Israeli Jews Attitudes toward Arabs, in Comparing Cultures and Conflicts (in German), eds. Peter Molt and Helga Dickow (BadenBaden: Nomos, 2007), 313.

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though comprising an ethnic-majority as early as the mid-1960s, 7 have represented a subaltern group. The Ashkenazi elite who sought to marginalize the internal Jewish other constructed and diffused, through the use of official state apparatuses, the notion of the Mizrahim as a unified and singular ethnic group. Contrary to this imagined inherent unity, the Mizrahi population includes people descending everywhere from Morocco and Yemen to Iraq and Iran; it primarily includes descendants of native Arabic and Persian speakers, but has come to include Sephardi (Iberian), Balkan, Turkish, Kurdish, and other Jews hailing from Eastern locales. To speak of the Mizrahim as a singular people defies the separate and rich histories of various peoplesMediterranean, North African, Middle Eastern, and even South and Central Asian. In Israel, however, the Mizrahiness of these distinguishable peoples has become something very realculturally, socially, and politically. Beginning with a shared experience of disaffection, 8 Mizrahi Israelis of all generations have united around their synthesized accent, culture, and subgroup narrative. Further, the Mizrahim have actualized, mobilized, and given genuine meaning to the identity forced on them by Israels Ashkenazi founders. Mizrahi scholar Sami Shalom Chetrit contends: [The leaders of the original Zionist movement] sought first of all to maintain Ashkenazi dominance and cultural hegemony. Hence, the Mizrahim of the first generation, deprived of all political power, struggled to survive in alien social and economic structures and found themselves subjected to a socialization process that in essence urged them to erase everything partaking of their identity and culture. 9

Sammy Smooha, Ethnic Stratification and Allegiance in Israel: Where Do Oriental Jews Belong II Politico 41, no. 4 (1976), 635. 8 Donna Rosenthal, The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land (Free Press: New York, 2003), 122. 9 Sami Shalom Chetrit, Mizrahi Politics in Israel: Between Integration and Alternative, Journal of Palestine Studies (Summer 2000), 62.

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Caught within the dominant Zionist construct and cultural hegemony of the Ashkenazim, Mizrahi Jews, for decades, found themselves alienated, discriminated against, and commonly deemed backward, too Arab, and hardly Jewish within mainstream Israeli society. 10 Nonetheless, the Ashkenazi elites attempted cultural massacre 11 and erasing of specific Mizrahi identities effectively aided in the re-homogenization of all Eastern and Spanish Jews around a sturdy Judeo-Arab identity. Indeed, today, half a century after their uneasy arrival to Israel, the Mizrahim have largely co-opted the Jewish states dominant culture, and increasingly direct its changing socio-political outlook from secular and socialist to traditional and capitalist. Since the late 1970s, the Mizrahim have slowly but steadily led a bottom-up cultural revolution that has transitioned into a right-wing populist reformation of the establishment, i.e. of the Ashkenazi-led socialist economic and political institutions. By presenting a negotiated (rather than oppositional) narrative of Zionism, the Mizrahim have made Zionism and Israeliness their own.12 The empowerment of the Mizrahim, however, has been long in its arrival. Notably, their political ascent as a social group has overwhelmingly taken the route of cultural infiltration and diffusion rather than direct governmental seizure. In short, the Mizrahim have gotten Ashkenazim to act like Mizrahim. Rather than being acculturated into the Israeli mainstream upon their immigration, the Mizrahim maintained many of their traditions, unified under a common

See Ella Shohat, Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims, Social Text no. 19/20 (Autumn 1988); and Rosenthal, 119-137; Sammy Smooha, Jewish Ethnicity in Israel: Symbolic or Real? in Jews in Israel: Contemporary Social and Cultural Patterns, ed. Uzi Rebhun (Hanover, NH: Brandies University Press, 2004). 11 Shohat, Sephardim in Israel, 32. 12 Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Mizrahi and Russian Challenges to Israels Dominant Culture: Divergences and Convergences, Israel Studies 12, no 3 (Fall 2007), 77.

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experience of disaffection and maltreatment by the ruling Ashkenazi elite social group, 13 and then set out to promote the attractiveness of their own cultural and ideological nuances. De-Naturalizing the Backward and Showcasing the Exotic The lengthy, decades-long, and ongoing, process of the Mizrahim showcasing their own cultural capital began simply with the re-articulation of the Mizrahia term the Ashkenazi elite invented for purposes of denigration, marginalization and ultimately control. 14 Through popular culture, language (via slang and accent), and collective behavior practices (cuisine, fashion and accessorizing, etc.), the Mizrahim turned the negative connotation of the term, which defined them, on its head. Instead of Mizrahi instantly meaning Eastern and thus backward in the consciousness of average Israelis, it began to mean and signify exotic, cool, and most importantly sexy and even dominant. 15 As Stuart Hall notes, societies and individuals always interpret, represent and represent meaning. By remaining true to their cultural roots and resisting acculturation within the dominant Ashkenazi society, the Mizrahim over time de-naturalized the stereotypes about themselves. They collectively achieved this de-naturalization first through simply living everyday life, and secondarily by infiltrating the consciousness of image producers (whether regarding film, television, radio, advertising, etc.) or

Rosenthal, 122-123. Ella Shohat, The Invention of the Mizrahim, Journal of Palestine Studies (Autumn 1999), 520. 15 Yaron Peleg, From Black to White: Changing Images of Mizrahim in Israeli Cinema, Israel Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 2008), 122-145.
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themselves becoming such producers. 16 The reality of a demographic majority standing as daily testaments against elitist stereotyping has in the long-run had the inverse effect as initially desired by the producers of such negative stereotypes. The production-consumption-reproduction cycle of negative stereotypes of the Mizrahim eventually contributed to the initiation of the de-naturalization process of the stereotypes by the 1980s. Slavoj Zizek notes: the ideological construction always finds its limits in the field of everyday experience An ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as argument in its favour. 17 With the pioneer generation of Ashkenazim, the anti-Mizrahi ideology set in and took hold, and everyday interactions could not offer a counter-point to ideology. But for later generations of Ashkenazim, daily interactions with Mizrahim that stood against the ideological narrative began to tear down that same ideologys functionality. As Ashkenazim gained Mizrahi friends, co-workers, Army comrades, acquaintances, and even spouses and relatives, the backward stereotype began to fall apart and become dysfunctional. Accordingly, the Arabness within Mizrahi culture began to smack of an appropriate exoticism within the collective Ashkenazi imaginationsocially instituting the unifying sentiment of after all, we Israelis are Middle Easterners too. Trailing Joseph Conrad and T.E. Lawrence: Ashkenazi Approaches to East-West Otherness Regarding their relations with the Mizrahim, Israels Ashkenazim have participated in the two most basic and common forms of Orientalism. The first, which

Stephanie Schwartz, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (1999 to 2005), unpublished M.A. thesis (Beer-Sheva, Israel: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2005), 17. 17 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 48-49.

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one can call the Conrad typology, consists of an open rejection of Eastern ways, denigrating them yet staying invested enough to seek to correct them. The second and more recent phenomenon, which one can call the T.E. Lawrence typology, consists of a romanticizing of Easterners and the East often followed by an ardent desire to fit in or even become one of, or one with, the admired. The previous refers more to the Ashkenazim being informed on the Mizrahim through hearsay or reading, whereas the latter indicates the framing of Ashkenazi views on the Mizrahim via experience. Historically, one can trace the roots of the Mizrahi/Ashkenazi distinction to cordial disagreements over Halakha (Jewish law) in the Diaspora, particularly among Sephardi Jews and Western European Ashkenazim. 18 So, why from day one in Israel did the predominately Eastern European-descending Ashkenazim promote ideological and semiotic demonizations of the largely non-Sephardi Mizrahim? Due to the highly ideological waves of European Zionist immigration to Ottoman-ruled southern Syria at the end of the 19th Century and early 20th Century, which continued throughout the British Mandate of Palestine from the 1920s to the 1940s, by 1948, the Jewish (that is, predominately Eastern European Ashkenazi) population of the nascent state of Israel had well-established ideas about the legitimate make-up of the new Jew. The Orthodox typified the old Jewi.e. the weak diasporic wanderer, nationless and always timid of conflict. But when Mizrahi Jews stepped foot in Israel, many pioneering Ashkenazim saw the Jews from the Islamic world as uncivilized savages and cave dwellers, 19 fitting

Peter Y. Medding, ed. Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), vii. 19 Shohat, Sephardim in Israel, 6.

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for a ruthless redressing and nationalist hazing. Mizrahi scholar Ella Shohat explains the victimized becomes the victimizer saga of the Ashkenazim, noting: Although Zionism collapses the Sephardim [and Mizrahim] and the Ashkenazim into the single category of one people, at the same time the [Sephardi and Mizrahis] Oriental difference threatens the European ideal-ego which phantasizes Israel as a prolongation of Europe in the Middle East, but not of itThe Ostjuden [i.e. Eastern European Jews], perennially marginalized by Europe, realized their desire of becoming Europe, ironically, in the Middle East, this time on the back of their own Ostjuden, the Eastern Jews. Having passed through their own ordeal of civility, as the blacks of Europe, they now imposed their civilizing tests on their own blacks. 20 With West meaning progressive and East conveying backward, Israels founders understood they had to construct an alternate reality to maintain cultural superiority in the consciousness of the diverse and rapidly growing Israeli populace. Israels Ashkenazi founders spoke at length about their concerns. For example, Israels founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion once warned: We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the [European] Diaspora. 21 Former-Prime Minister Golda Meir once declared: Those who do not speak Yiddish are not Jews. 22 Even internationally celebrated scholar and Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once argued: One of the great apprehensions which afflict usis the danger of the predominance of immigrants of Oriental origin forcing Israel to equalize its cultural level with that of the neighboring [Arab] world. 23

20 21

Shohat, Sephardim in Israel, 23. David Ben-Gurion quoted in Shohat, Sephardim in Israel, 4. 22 Golda Meir quoted in Shohat, Sephardim in Israel, 8. 23 Abba Eban quoted in Shohat, Sephardim in Israel, 4.

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A number of linguistic and semiotic examples expose Ashkenazi alterations of reality, and highlight the intent of their constructions aimed at the denigration of the Mizrahim. For example, in Arabic, Morocco is called al-Mahgrebliterally, meaning the West. Thus, in reference to a traditional map produced in the Western world, many of the Mizrahim (Moroccans make up about half of the Mizrahi population in Israel) came from places further West than all Eastern European Jews. Yet, Israels early leaders attempted to confuse this reality through a targeted and abrasive manipulation of words. Indeed, when many Jews from the Arab world immigrated to Israel, they did not employ family names. Instead of a modern European-style last name, many Jews from the Arab world went by their given name and added son of [their father] or a geographical location as a secondary title. For example, if Amir ben Shalom had a son named Ezra, he would go by Ezra ben Amir, and if Ezra had a son named Assaf, he would go by Assaf ben Ezra, so on and so forth. Upon immigration to Israel, many Jews take on a new Israeli name. In the case of new Jewish immigrants from the Islamic world, Israeli officials would make it a practice to designate newcomers with the last name MizrahiEasterner. Even if he or she hailed from Morocco/al-Maghreb, the new immigrant was not given the Hebrew equivalent Maaravi (Westerner) to the Arabic Maghrebi (Westerner), 24 but rather he or she was also deemed Mizrahi or Easterner. Similarly, the Ashkenazi leadership commonly neglected the reality that most Mizrahim were much more educated and urban than most Eastern European Jews who immigrated to Israel. During the mass immigration of Mizrahim in the 1950s and 1960s,

One should note that some Moroccan immigrant families caught on to this attempted nonsensical labeling and demanded the name Maaravi. The last name Ben-Shoham (Son of Onyx), which refers to the black gem, displays a similar example of resistance.

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Ashkenazi elite contended that the influx of so many Jews from backward countries would stifle Israels potential. 25 Yet, a simple comparison and contrast of Tangier and Beirut of the 1950s and 1960s to Poland and Russia of the 1920s and 1930s illuminates how drastically the Ashkenazim intentionally misrepresented the roots of most Mizrahi immigrants. Further, the cosmopolitan awareness of Mizrahi immigrants is evident in their common listing of cities rather than countries as place of origina practice that stood in stark contrast to the Ashkenazi immigrant who hailed from a remote shetl (small town) somewhere in the Ukraine. The Mizrahim, however, would not bow to outright subjugation. Remaining resolute through decades of cultural persecution, the Mizrahim outlasted the Ashkenazi generational will to subjugate internal Jewish others. In a Zizekian sense, the Mizrahim successfully over-conformed to the Ashkenazi cultural hegemony, imploding it from within and rebuilding the Zionist structure on an Eastern design. Whether out of pragmatism or realization, a generational shift among the Ashkenazimfrom demonizing the Mizrahim to practicing Mizrahiphiliamade an opening for Mizrahi cooptation. In addition, at some point, the Mizrahim became bigger believers in the Zionist project than succeeding generations of Ashkenazim, who at some point became much more interested in embracing Middle Eastern qualities than bringing the West to the Middle East, as their parents and grandparents attempted to do for decades. Sammy Smooha recognizes, cultural openness developed in the 1970sCultural expression compatible with the core Israeli culture were permitted and even encouraged. A

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Shohat, Sephardim in Israel, 5.

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component known as Mizrahi Heritage was added to the school curriculum. 26 As the Ashkenazim relaxed, the Mizrahim took up the mantle of the ever energetic Israeli fighting against all odds. 27 The now nearly obsolete crown jewel of Ashkenazi socialismthe kibbutzim (collective farms), which today remain only dotted on the Israeli landscape as tourist attractions, exemplifies the Ashkenazim collectively shedding their European socialist skin. Tellingly, the Mizrahi moshav (private property and familyoriented version of the kibbutz) still thrives, symbolizing the reordering of Israeli cultural and economic practices. With the coming-of-age of the latest Israeli generation, which finds Mizrahi culture to have an incessantly cool or sababa (in Hebrew) quality, the general Israeli public has begun to adopt, as its own, the Mizrahi negotiated meaning of Zionist ideology, Israeli collective identity, and, to an extent, Jewishness. By gaining a line into the dominant Israeli culture via pop culture, the Mizrahim have injected their own meanings into the collective Israeli narrative. Accordingly, the Mizrahim have to a degree co-opted the socio-political/economic hegemony of the Ashkenazim by asserting a cultural hegemony. Important to this lengthy process, the Mizrahim resisted sub-group labeling, insisting on their Israeliness. And, in a Pascalian-Zizekian sense, this faith in Israeliness actualized their Israeliness, and put the Ashkenazi elite, who claimed ownership over Israeliness, on the defensive. Israeli cinema scholar, Yaron Peleg notes: [Within Israeli film] by the 1990s, Mizrahim, rather than being denigrated or marginalized, often

26 27

Smooha, Jewish Ethnicity in Israel, 56. Peleg, 135.

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epitomize the very idea of Israeliness. 28 Similar changes occurred within other cultural arenas of Israeli society. A young Mizrahi woman interviewed for a sociological study in 2003, summarizes: [Now] Ashkenazim love our music. They used to call it cheap central bus station cassette music, and that made me angry. Now its all over the radio. On TV showsAshkenazim try to sound Mizrahi. My [Ashkenazi] friends wear hamsas. They hang them on their car mirrors for good luck. Its not just our food and music anymore; theyve finally discovered other parts of our culture are cool. 29 Notably, the they to which this young Mizrahi interviewee refers changed. Later generations of Ashkenazim have increasingly appreciated the cultural capital of Mizrahiness. Moreover, the latest generation of Ashkenazim has worked as a conduit for the normalization of Mizrahi culture into the Israeli mainstream. And the Mizrahim have seized the power extended by this sycophantic, if not convivial, Orientalism. The Palestinian Role in Validating the Mizrahi Negotiated Narrative of Israeliness As Shohat acknowledges, [t]he Zionist master-narrative has little place for either Palestinians or Sephardim [and Mizrahim], but while Palestinians possess a clear counter narrative, the Sephardi [and Mizrahi] story is a fractured one 30 Though the Ashkenazim denigrated the Mizrahim for decades after their immigration to Israel, the Palestinians have always held up the overt oppositional narrative of nationalism within the direct political environment. Accordingly, the Ashkenazim never saw the Mizrahim as an existential threat but rather a problem that required correcting. After all, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim share a common enemythe Palestinian Arab-Muslim.
28 29

Peleg, 124. Rosenthal, 129. 30 Shohat, Sephardim in Israel, 7.

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The Ashkenazi underestimation of Mizrahi cultural and political prowess allowed for the Mizrahi entrance and eventual cooptation of mainstream Israeli society via a negotiated presentation of Israeliness. Mizrahim accepted Israeliness at the identity level, but at the cultural level demonstrated they would go about being Israeli in an entirely different manner. In doing so, they offered a negotiated understanding of Zionism to the Israeli populace as a whole, which included a much more salient and antagonistic stance toward relations with the Palestinians in particular and the Arab and Islamic worlds in general. During the 1990s as many in Israeli society harbored high hopes for peace, the Mizrahi concerns and stance against the Oslo peace process fell on deaf ears. However, the Mizrahim gained validation within mainstream Israeli society when their long-held suspicions about the Oslo peace process came true. The Mizrahim had consistently warned the (predominantly Ashkenazi) Israeli Left about the unpredictable nature of Arab politics. And Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafats rejection of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Baraks offer for a final peace settlement in 2000, and the subsequent and significantly bloodier second Palestinian intifada (uprising), validated Mizrahi claims in the minds of most Israelis. The dashed hope for peace that sunk into Israeli society circa 2000-2001 roundly de-legitimized the Ashkenazi elites primary political partyAvodah (Labor)creating a political gap, wherein Israels moderates became the new Left, embodied in the Kadima (Forward) party and a new right emerged with the Mizrahim leading the ideological charge, and thus bolstering the popularity of right-wing parties like Likud (Consolidation) and Shas (Six Orders).

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Co-Opting Common Sense: Implications of Mizrahi Cultural Politics With regard to the Gramscian notion that Each social group has its own common sense and conception of the world, one could contend that the Mizrahi common sense has largely taken over Israeli common sense. Holding to this line of thought, one could take the logic further and suggest that the Mizrahim have made the Ashkenazi state into a truly Jewish state as originally envisioned. Indeed, the Jewish-Israeli populace has, to a fair extent, unified around the cultural and ideological particularities of the Mizrahima measure that the Ashkenazim failed to genuinely offer from the onset. As detailed above, the Mizrahim persevered through decades of denigration but ultimately gained entrance into Israeli mass culture with the aid of a friendly Orientalist Ashkenazi population. The seeming materialization of prophetic warnings against the Oslo peace process took the Mizrahim from a crude electoral power within Israeli politics based on simple numbers to establishing the foundation for a genuinely organic political platform that now has the attention of all Israeli citizens. Together, these forces have permitted the Mizrahim to politicize the mass base of Israeli society for their own ideological purposes, shifting Israeli politics to the right, refocusing the economy away from a socialist approach to a capitalist prescription, and reestablishing a collective appreciation for traditional Jewish values. Today, Israels politics and defense forces reflect the shift that has occurred. Israels Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom among numerous other key politicians and many of the Jewish states top generals are Mizrahi, and they achieved their positions without the slightest hint of controversy. However, a number of issues linger that highlight continuing Ashkenazi-Mizrahi friction. The pro-peace camp in Israel, regarding

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a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, relies heavily of the political power of the Ashkenazim, 31 and the Mizrahi base shows no signs of altering its positions on peace with the Palestinians at any time in the near future. The Mizrahim collectively remain poorer and less educated than Ashkenazi Israelis. While this has not prevented the Mizrahim from asserting their common sense as the Israeli common sense, it has caused some Mizrahim to internalize old stereotypes that underestimate their potential. But the tragic and irreparable effect of the long journey of the Mizrahim lies with the reality that the Arab Jew of old remains, and most likely will stay, lost in the shuffle of the post-WWI rise of nationalism across the Middle East. Just as the Jewish immigrants from the Arab world first realized upon their entrance to Israeli society that Arabness and Jewishness had become antonyms, 32 the latest generation of Mizrahim in Israel has had to solidify this tension in order to pursue and take its rightful place atop the Jewish states cultural/political hierarchy.

Oren Yiftachel, Israeli Society and Jewish-Palestinian Reconciliation: Ethnocracy and Its Territorial Contradictions, The Middle East Journal no. 51, 4 (Autumn 1997), 519. 32 Shohat, Sephardim in Israel, 11.

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